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As “KnightHawk,” James Ricklef has written an online column
for the American Tarot Association since 1999 in which he performs three-card
readings for fictional characters, mythic figures and people from history.
Tarot Tells the Tale collects 22 such readings, thematically arranged around
the Major Arcana, plus a Celtic Cross reading (for the real-life woman on whose
life The King and I was based). But before we get to the readings,
Ricklef guides us through the usual “Tarot 101” material: numerological and
elemental associations, reversed cards and so on. This section, which takes up
nearly one-fifth of the book, will likely bore those already familiar with those
who have turned to the book seeking new approaches to tarot reading, but may
prove useful to others who want to use Ricklef's examples to better understand
the basic reading process.

While he does suggest at one point that the tarot deck is
just a deck of cards and that the true magic lies within the reader, Ricklef
still tends to mystify the act of tarot reading by ascribing personality or
consciousness to the cards. Thus we hear of “the whispered truths of the
Tarot,” and how he “always trusted the Tarot to speak to me, even...in seeming
riddles” or when “expressing a sense of humor.” When he performs a reading for
Dr. Jekyll, he wonders why the Devil card doesn’t show up, then says “that would
have been too obvious, and the Tarot works in subtler ways.” On at least one
occasion, however, he alludes to an authority above and beyond the deck,
claiming “the Universe, speaking through the cards, never lies.”

So we are expected to believe that a tarot reading is a
“soulful practice” of intuiting the “true meaning” of messages from the universe
or some other guiding spirit. If this were really the case, might it not then
be frivolous to apply this technique to fictional characters and dead people?
Ricklef never fully addresses this potential dilemma, partially deflecting the
issue by emphasizing the role of the reader’s own intuition in the process. So
you should free-associate when reading in order not to stifle your intuition,
because an answer that makes sense will inevitably make itself known, even if
you have to sort through several nonsense answers to get it. (Which doesn’t
prove that intuition “works,” only that if you make enough statements, the
likelihood of one ringing true increases.) He even advises you to cut the deck
with your non-dominant hand because it’s “more under the influence of your
intuitive brain.” This is not uniformly true for all human beings, and
neurologists might have more to say on the subject, but more importantly, which
hand you cut the deck with has no significant impact on the cards that
eventually turn up -- and certainly offers no metaphysical guarantee the “right”
cards will appear.

Putting aside the arbitrary associations imposed upon the
cards, and the irrational assumptions about the generation and interpretation of
a given reading, let’s consider the content of Ricklef’s examples. You may
quickly grow annoyed, as I did, by his habit of beginning and ending each
reading with cloying thank yous to the querent for allowing him to read for
them. You might also find his interpretations of these stories somewhat
superficial. Ricklef tells us he considers the King Midas story “amusing and
endearing,” not exactly the way I would describe the tale of a man brought to
the brink of starvation and forced to witness the apparent death of his beloved
daughter. But I came to suspect, after a while, that he had less familiarity
with his sources than he let on. For example, after performing the Jekyll
reading, Ricklef “came to realize that the doctor’s potion separated the good
and evil halves of his psyche, and was intended to give control of his life to
his better half.” But you hardly need to perform a tarot reading to figure that
out, since Robert Louis Stevenson makes the point quite plain in the actual
story. Anyway, he advises Jekyll to love himself more and seek help from his
friends, then glibly concludes, “Alas for poor Dr. Jekyll, if he ever did
receive such advice, he obviously ignored it.” But Jekyll never received such
advice, of course, because he doesn’t exist outside of a fictional story.

The Death card shows up in a reading for Daedalus, the
father of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, so Ricklef suggests “you will
have to release something important in your life.” Of course, Ricklef plays
with a stacked deck, so to speak, because he already knows how this story, like
all the stories he chooses, ends, but reminds us to inform querents the Death
card almost never means someone will die. Yet the point here appears to be that
someone will (or, at the very least, might) die, and Ricklef has
deliberately hidden that possibility from the querent. If Daedalus existed in
real life, one could conceivably argue that Ricklef’s choice to withhold this
potential interpretation contributed to the death of Icarus by not fully
alerting Daedalus to the specific risks involved in their flight. This
underlines the major flaw in the “Death doesn’t mean death” line of reasoning
that dominates modern tarot interpretation, intended to make sure querents never
feel threatened by tarot readings. Avoiding discussion of death may leave the
querent in a better mood, but as this reading shows, the omission may also do a
fatal disservice.

The omission of death also colors Ricklef’s interpretation
of the story of Cain and Abel, in which Abel says his brother has been “cold and
withdrawn,” behaving strangely, and “may even be planning to do me harm.” He
asks, “What’s wrong? Or am I just being paranoid?” Ricklef refuses to answer
that question, even fictionally, and suggests, “I think what you are trying to
ask is something like, ‘What do you need to know about your relationship with
your brother?’” Well, no -- Abel doesn’t want to know about his relationship,
he wants to know what’s wrong with his brother. If a tarot reader can’t or
won’t answer that, fine, but said reader should not then pretend the querent
wants to know something other than the subject of his question. Again, if Abel
really existed, advice beyond the bland admonition to “help your brother find
love in his own heart before it is too late” might have done a better job of
alerting Abel to the presence of danger and saved his life.

Ricklef also asks, “Have you ever wondered what the heck
Cain was thinking?” If you’ve actually read Genesis, probably not, for you know
“Cain was very wroth” because God had rejected his offering in favor of Abel’s.
The Devil card happens to come up in this reading, which leads Ricklef to ponder
whether “the Devil made him do it,” but he rejects that notion because
“typically the Devil card indicates the shadow aspects of our human nature.”
Typically, perhaps, if you buy into Ricklef’s preferred interpretive framework,
which doesn’t have much room for the Judeo-Christian god and devil, relying
instead on the New Age concept of the “Higher Self” or “the divinity within all
of us.”

He utilizes this concept to inappropriate effect during his
“reading” for Joan of Arc, who wants to know if the voices in her head are
“truly those of angels.” Again rejecting the querent’s premise, he asks what
Joan needs to know about the voices, suggesting that they may come from Joan’s
Higher Self. Never mind that people in her time didn’t believe in Higher
Selves -- though they did believe in souls, the soul was not distinct from the
individual and certainly didn’t exist on some higher, more divine level during
the individual’s lifetime -- and would have considered his advice heretical.
(For that matter, Joan might have considered the very act of seeking advice from
a tarot reader, if she even had recourse to such divination, an act of heresy as
well.)

As you might guess from the examples above, Ricklef changes
the question frequently to suit his own sense of what one can or cannot learn
from the tarot. Thus, no questions about what will happen (because one can
always change the future), no questions about what one should do in a given
situation (because one should always make decisions for oneself), no questions
about the actions or thoughts of other people (for that would violate Ricklef’s
ethics concerning privacy). Every reading gets steered towards the preferred
goal, “to provide the querent with insights about himself and about the world
around him in order to show him how he can create the future he wants.” (Hard
to do, I’d say, when your jealous brother plots to kill you at the first
opportunity!) “What do I need to know about my relationship with...?” becomes a
favorite substitute for all sorts of questions, such as “Will my boyfriend ask
me to marry him?” (He rejects another alternative framing of that question
because “we can’t, in essence, ask what the querent can do to make her boyfriend
propose to her -- when, actually, that seems a perfectly reasonable question.)

Still, we have no reason to doubt Ricklef’s claim that he
didn’t preselect the cards for any given reading in order to find the “perfect”
card for his characters. I can’t say the same for the examples in Julie
Gillentine’s Tarot and Dream Interpretation. In the most blatant case,
she lays out two cards for a woman who dreamt about her dead husband: the Queen
of Swords and Death. How fortuitous that she should get the perfect pair of
cards to read for a widow!

Gillentine shows an even greater tendency towards
mystification than Ricklef. In the widow’s reading, for example, she proposes,
“Perhaps the first husband chose to linger to reduce some karma from his part in
causing the woman pain.” Perhaps. Then again, perhaps the first husband didn’t
linger at all and existed in the dream only as a figment of the woman’s
imagination. But Gillentine never gives such commonsense explanations serious
consideration, because she places too great a faith in the oracular quality of
dreams to entertain the idea that a dream might NOT have a message for the
dreamer. (In this, she is heavily influenced by the teachings of Edgar Cayce.)
She also believes the use of tarot readings to interpret dreams creates a
“powerful synergy” that “engages dream consciousness in the waking state.”
(Another interesting issue for a neurologist to take up, as she herself points
out.) And the spirit world plays a strong role in her interpretations of these
dreams; in addition to the dead husband, her “clients” also encounter ghosts of
9/11 victims, connections to past lives, and messages from the ubiquitous Higher
Selves.

Yet Gillentine doesn’t even fully engage the dreams given
to her to interpret. In one case, her client describes seeing cards from
Crowley’s Thoth deck. She recognizes the Death card, but not the other one,
though she believes it comes from the Swords suit. So Gillentine picks one for
her, the Eight of Swords, “a woman blindfolded, tied, and surrounded by
swords.” The RWS Eight of Swords may contain that image, but the woman didn’t
dream about cards from the RWS deck. By switching decks on the client and
interpreting the “wrong” card, Gillentine ignores data she should, by her own
standards, scrutinize closely, thus distorting the final analysis. In the end,
this client “resolved to continue working with her dreams... to gain further
wisdom into her issues.” Maybe that’s the point: while many tarot readers
advise querents not to rely too extensively on readings, Gillentine’s dream
reading model could provide justification for frequent consultations to “work
with” the client’s dreams, subtly increasing the querent’s dependence upon tarot
or the tarot reader.

Both books are padded with introductory material on
suggested card meanings, but Gillentine loads her book even further, throwing in
a 50-page “dream dictionary” and organizing her presentation to run through all
the dream spreads once, then go through them again with sample cards when she
could much more efficiently present the material by offering a spread and a
sample reading together.

When you get right down
to it, using tarot to interpret dreams simply “explains” one story by telling
another story, with no guarantee, other than Gillentine’s assumptions, that
either story will have anything to do with the other. The story the cards tell
depends entirely upon which cards turn up, creating any number of possible
stories -- so unless you believe some Divine energy controls card placement as
well as dream content, the tarot reading offers only random images to juxtapose
against other (potentially random) images. Although I suspect they didn’t
intend to do so, she and Ricklef actually provide strong evidence AGAINST a
mystical component to tarot reading by demonstrating how we can apply the cards
to all sorts of situations, even unreal ones, and achieve similar results in all
cases. While this doesn’t necessarily denigrate the stories we project onto the
cards when reading for ourselves or other actual people, it should alert us to
the fact that those stories have no source beyond our own imaginations.